Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company
Reporter Alice Driver highlights the courage and determination of immigrant workers in their fight against the largest meatpacking company in America.
Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company by Alice Driver, Atria/One Signal Publishers
Immigration is a hot ticket issue in the United States, and it's easy to forget that immigrants are often the ones working overlooked jobs, like in poultry and meatpacking plants. When you go to the store and purchase a bag of chicken nuggets, I’d guess it’s not your first thought of who killed, skinned, and processed those chickens so they could be waiting for you on a store shelf. Even further, what are the conditions at those factories like? Who are those workers? Are they fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters? Where do they live? Are they happy?
In a consumerist culture, these details are brushed aside, and the product is given more value than the process of how it was made. But a look into the true workings of the American meatpacking industry may reveal injustices that you didn’t initially expect.
In Life and Death of The American Worker, Alice Driver details the life of immigrant workers at Tyson Foods factories in a raw, holistic manner, creating a heartbreaking and inspiring narrative that is true to the lives of these people and their experiences. Following Tyson workers such as Placido Leopoldo Arrue and Angelina Pacheco, you are transported right into the center of the harsh conditions of these Tyson factories. While reading, I could practically smell the metallic scent of fresh blood, hear the whirring of the machines, and feel the unease as Angelina walked across the slick factory floors, hoping not to slip. Weaving together real-life stories, personal anecdotes, historical information, and statistics, Driver presents the real story of Tyson Foods, leaving out none of the bloody details.
Many immigrant workers and families appear in this book, and we spend time with them both at home and at work, trying to navigate the injustices they face at Tyson. The dirty underbelly of Tyson Foods is exposed through the eyes of immigrants working at a Tyson plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where they cut chicken for hours on end with little to no safety precautions, breaks, or accommodations. The workers suffer from many physical ailments like carpal tunnel syndrome. The image of Angelina’s hands moving in her sleep, decapitating countless invisible chickens from memory, is a haunting one that truly encapsulates the dedication of these workers and the neglect they receive in return from Tyson.
In one truly devastating case, Placido Leopoldo Arrue suffered from extreme respiratory issues because of a chemical explosion at the plant. Many of the workers were unable to escape because their supervisors blocked the door, causing more exposure to the chemicals. Afterward, many employees like Placido were unable to receive a proper diagnosis and medical care because Tyson employees could only see Tyson-approved physicians. After many years of “Tyson doctors,” as the workers called them, telling Placido that he was fine, he tragically died in 2020 after catching COVID-19 at work due to the lack of precautions implemented by Tyson. His family was not given any money to help pay for the funeral. His wife had to say goodbye to him on a Zoom call.
Despite the images on the sides of Tyson's trucks advertising the company's family ethos, the truth was far different for Tyson workers. Along with a lack of health safeguards, immigrant Tyson workers were also subject to horrible mistreatment from Tyson corporate. One employee, Victor, secretly recorded many conversations with his supervisors, revealing their lack of care toward the concerns of the factory workers. Workers were often forced to sign documents they couldn't understand and received inadequate training from manuals in English despite only speaking Spanish. Workers were not given enough time to heal from injuries and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, were penalized for staying home and quarantining if they tested positive but were asymptomatic. Workers lived in constant fear of the company punishing them for speaking out against the hardships they faced and were often scared into silence.
Despite these injustices, the resilience of these workers and their families shines through. Through banding together and working with Magaly Licolli and Venceremos, an organization that fights for the rights of poultry workers and to improve working conditions, Tyson workers have attempted to reclaim their narrative and tell the true story of working at Tyson. As the workers state multiple times throughout these interviews, they’re happy to work, as long as the conditions are safe, the pay is fair, and they are not treated like robots. Unfortunately, fighting for workers' rights is often a nonlinear uphill battle, and the class action lawsuit filed by these workers suing Tyson for its lack of COVID-19 precautions, which led to the death of many workers, was dismissed in April of 2024.
I finished reading Alice Driver’s Life and Death of The American Worker last weekend and the feeling it left with me was hard to describe. The accounts in this book are real, and the pain and frustration alive in them jump off the page, latch onto you like a leech. You close the book, and it stays with you. I think that’s a special kind of gift only a book like this can offer: the gift of allowing you to get to know hard-working, loving, good people who you’d never know otherwise, to carry their stories with you and tell others about them. Through that, people like Placido, his fight, his dream, live on and become more and more achievable which each utterance of his name.
There’s a great sadness in this book, an overwhelming anger often invisible to us. But sitting there after finishing it, I felt a sense of hope in knowing people like Angelina, Victor, and Magaly are continuing to fight for immigrant workers who are mistreated and silenced. Their bravery should not go unnoticed or exist unreplicated. Marginalized groups like these need support now more than ever. And in a country founded by immigrants, how can we not stand up for the ones who feed us?
Editor's Note: We previously featured this book in the Narrative & Biography category of our 2024 Business Book Awards. You can read our earlier coverage here.
